Baking with Bards: A Delicious Literary Coloring Book
I made a coloring book! Buy it on Amazon using this link: Baking with Bards: A Delicious Literary Coloring Book by Lisa Marie Beiswenger
See your favorite classic authors in ways you have never seen them before: making pastries, cakes, pies, and cookies! This coloring book is designed for anyone who loves literature and baking. It features 14 illustrations of authors making sweet treats. Each illustration is paired with a quote pulled from the author’s body of work and modified to fit with the baking theme. The book ends with a full list of the authors’ names, unmodified quotes, and where the quote originates. This coloring book is fun for classroom contexts or for adults who love literature and coloring. This book is only a coloring book. It contains no recipes.
About the author/illustrator: Lisa has pictures in her brain, and she needs to get them out. She’s not a great artist, but she tries very hard. She lives next door to her parents and brother in a 175-year-old log cabin with two cats, eight hens, and one ornery rooster. When she’s not doodling or tending to her critters, she teaches Writing, Food Anthropology, Literary Theory, and Linguistics at a small liberal arts university about two hours east of Pittsburgh. She loves to read and watch NHL and PWHL hockey, often at the same time. This is her first coloring book.
The coloring book is available on Amazon.com https://a.co/d/0g9M8qGx.
In this video, I teach you how to make Oscar the Grouch cupcakes. To do this project you will need:
- White frosting
- Chocolate frosting (or brown food coloring)
- Red food coloring
- Green food coloring
- 3 pastry bags
- Edible eyes
- Chocolate cupcakes
- Wilton pastry bag tips, #233, #4, and #3
- A knife
Have fun!
Making an Icing Rose
Are you sick of watching endless videos where people are good at things? Then I have something fun for you! Watch as I begin my journey to learn how to decorate cakes. In this episode, I try to create my first icing rose.
In the video, I joke that comments should be directed to Emmy Made in Japan. Her videos are awesome. If you like my videos, you will love hers.
I also welcome constructive feedback on how I can improve my technique. I’m pretty sure that I’m using the wrong petal tip (I’ll talk about that in my follow-up video in a few days), and I think that my icing needed to be chilled a bit more. It was a warm day, and my icing was straight out of the room temperature tub.
Unboxing: Cake Decorating Kit
To make up for the long hiatus, here’s the first episode of Eat at Lu’s from my new apartment. In this episode, I unbox a cake decorating kit in preparation of things to come.
Also, it’s called an icing spatula. That’s the phrase I was trying to think of.
Testing a Gadget: Spread That
After a longer than short hiatus, I present my review of Spread That, a butter knife that heats up using the heat from the user’s hand. This is the final video at my old apartment, and now that I have finished my PhD and I’m all settled in at the new place, I’ll be able to post more regularly!
Testing a Gadget: EggXact Peel
In this video, I test out the EggXact Peel for its intended use opening eggs, and then I fail in kiwi class.
Testing a Gadget: Salad Chopper
Is there an easier way to chop a salad? In this episode, I test out a device that purports to make it easier to eat healthy.
The Sweetest Puffle
Part two of the Puffle expose in which I explore the sweet puffle. My new friend Merle also auditions to be my new sous chef.
Will it Waffe: Puffle
In this video, I’m putting a spin on something I saw on Epicurious. I’m making a puffle stromboli. A puffle is a waffle made with puff pastry that can be filled with all sorts of goodness. In this case, I’m putting cheese, pepperoni, and sautéed vegetables to make a sort of puffle stromboli. I realize that it’s somewhat sacrilegious to call this a stromboli, but it is the only way I can think of to describe it. I hope you’ll forgive me.
The idea came from here: https://www.epicurious.com/recipes-menus/fast-easy-puff-pastry-waffle-article
Egg Dyeing Techniques
In this video, I use some interesting techniques that I got from the Home and Gardens website to make some very pretty dyed eggs. The first technique is to swirl rubber cement on the eggs before dyeing. The second technique is supposed to give a tie-dye look to the egg. And the third technique gives a cool speckled/splattered look to the eggs. To prepare my dye, I used 1 cup of boiling water, two tablespoons of white vinegar, and about 40 drops of food coloring. For the third technique, I added 1 tablespoon of oil to the dye bath and swirled the oil around before I put the egg in.
There was a little mishap with the pink egg that I put the rubber cement on. I was having some trouble getting the salty rubber cement off the egg, so I tried to rinse it off. Unfortunately, that also rinsed off some of the dye. I put it back in the dye bath, so it would be a little more blue. I think it turned out kind of neat, but it doesn’t really show off the rubber cement technique very well any more.
